Hornborg, Alf Clark Brett and Hermele, Kenneth(2012) Ecology and Power Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future

Power and social inequality shape patterns of land use and resource management. This
book explores this relationship from different perspectives, illuminating the complexity
of interactions between human societies and nature. Most of the contributors use the perspective
of “political ecology” as a point of departure, recognizing that human relations
to the environment and human social relations are not separate phenomena but inextricably
intertwined. What makes this volume unique is that it sets this approach in a transdisciplinary,
global, and historical framework.
The twenty-six contributors represent a spectrum of academic fields including anthropology,
sociology, geography, economics, economic history, historical archaeology,
human ecology, development studies, and sustainability science. In presenting local case
studies from all over the world, the contributors develop a global understanding of these
politicized environments. They generally apply a broadly conceived world-system
approach to issues of land use, resource management, and environmental change. Examples
discussed in this book include the cultivation of various crops such as wheat, rice,
sorghum, coffee, sugarcane, Jatropha, and safflower; the raising of livestock such as
llamas and cattle; and other extractive activities such as forestry, mining, energy production,
and the trade in guano and ivory.
The volume also adds a deep historical dimension to political ecology. Collectively, it
argues that a long-term, historical understanding of how local and global power struggles
shape the trajectories of human–environmental relations is crucial to the emergent field of
political ecology. This point applies, for example, to the past two centuries of fossilfuelled
capitalism, during which human dependency on land appears to have become less
tangible than in pre-industrial times. Against this background, several chapters discuss
the implications of the anticipated return to biofuels, which would transform the rationality
of conventional land use and regenerate contradictions between food and energy production
in regions of the world that have largely been spared such contradictions over the
past two centuries.